Some notes about HTTP/3

Robert Graham shares some notes about HTTP/3. The whole blog post is well worth the read. Here are some of my favorite bits.

Google is in control of future web protocol development:

Google (pbuh) has both the most popular web browser (Chrome) and the two most popular websites (#1 Google.com #2 Youtube.com). Therefore, they are in control of future web protocol development. Their first upgrade they called SPDY (pronounced “speedy”), which was eventually standardized as the second version of HTTP, or HTTP/2. Their second upgrade they called QUIC (pronounced “quick”), which is being standardized as HTTP/3.

De jure vs. de facto standards:

There is a good lesson here about standards. Outside the Internet, standards are often de jure, run by government, driven by getting all major stakeholders in a room and hashing it out, then using rules to force people to adopt it. On the Internet, people implement things first, and then if others like it, they’ll start using it, too. Standards are often de facto, with RFCs being written for what is already working well on the Internet, documenting what people are already using. SPDY was adopted by browsers/servers not because it was standardized, but because the major players simply started adding it. The same is happening with QUIC: the fact that it’s being standardized as HTTP/3 is a reflection that it’s already being used, rather than some milestone that now that it’s standardized that people can start using it.

Why QUIC?

QUIC is really more of a new version of TCP (TCP/2???) than a new version of HTTP (HTTP/3). It doesn’t really change what HTTP/2 does so much as change how the transport works. Therefore, my comments below are focused on transport issues rather than HTTP issues.

The major headline feature is faster connection setup and latency. TCP requires a number of packets being sent back-and-forth before the connection is established. SSL again requires a number of packets sent back-and-forth before encryption is established. If there is a lot of network delay, such as when people use satellite Internet with half-second ping times, it can take quite a long time for a connection to be established. By reducing round-trips, connections get setup faster, so that when you click on a link, the linked resource pops up immediately

The next headline feature is bandwidth. There is always a bandwidth limitation between source and destination of a network connection, which is almost always due to congestion. Both sides need to discover this speed so that they can send packets at just the right rate. Sending packets too fast, so that they’ll get dropped, causes even more congestion for others without improving transfer rate. Sending packets too slowly means unoptimal use of the network.

Let’s talk some numbers:

In my own tests, you are limited to about 500,000 UDP packets/second using the typical recv() function, but with recvmmsg() and some other optimizations (multicore using RSS), you can get to 5,000,000 UDP packets/second on a low-end quad-core server. Since this scales well per core, moving to the beefy servers with 64 cores should improve things even further.

Interesting note on the mobile support:

Another cool solution in QUIC is mobile support. As you move around with your notebook computer to different WiFI networks, or move around with your mobile phone, your IP address can change. The operating system and protocols don’t gracefully close the old connections and open new ones. With QUIC, however, the identifier for a connection is not the traditional concept of a “socket” (the source/destination port/address protocol combination), but a 64-bit identifier assigned to the connection.

Conclusion:

When TCP was created in the 1970s, it was sublime. It handled things, like congestion, vastly better than competing protocols. For all that people claim IPv4 didn’t anticipate things like having more than 4-billion addresses, it anticipated the modern Internet vastly better than competing designs throughout the 70s and 80s. The upgrade from IPv4 to IPv6 largely maintains what makes IP great. The upgrade from TCP to QUIC is similarly based on what makes TCP great, but extending it to modern needs. It’s actually surprising TCP has lasted this long, and this well, without an upgrade.